
with Colab Cooperative for the Food Rescue Alliance.
Led redesign strategy of a web+mobile logistics tool that helps food rescues more efficiently coordinate between food donors and recipients, communicate with their volunteer base, and see where needs arise across their communities. Responsibilities spanned from stakeholder interviews to feature prioritization, concepting, wireframing, testing, iteration, and feedback. The interactive prototype tested well with the project partners, rescue coordinators, and volunteers and is currently in development.
The Food Rescue Alliance aims to create a more just and less wasteful food system through both movement building and direct support to grassroots, community-based, food recovery programs. FRA supports food rescue organizations through peer-to-peer learning, trainings, consulting, resource sharing and workshops. FRA members encompass values such as: health equity, community-driven work, participation, volunteerism, and committing to working on systems-level change. (Find out more here.)
FRA approached Co.Lab to redesign Boulder Food Rescue’s custom, open-source rescue coordination tool, the Food Rescue Robot. While core functionality worked, the interface was less-than-ideal for a common mobile volunteer use case, and many of the software quirks required odd workarounds — especially for those rescues who did not operate in the same model as BFR. A few rescues in the Alliance used the Robot; others were hesitant to adopt it given its idiosyncrasies.
Our challenge was to understand how coordinators and volunteers across various different types of food rescues would want to interact with a logistics tool that would best serve their needs. To build something that could adequately scale across the Alliance, the resulting redesign needed to be simple enough to allow a coordinator to quickly do their work, yet flexible enough to allow for the various different models of food rescue work — while remaining accessible to staff and volunteers who may vary in their levels of technology access or familiarity.